


Guns for Hands

by Goldstone_Wolf



Category: Hermitcraft RPF, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Bitter ending, Blood, Crying, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Emotional Whump, Gen, Grian has bad mental health i guess, Griangst, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicidal Thoughts, Implied/Referenced Temporary Character Death, Physical Whump, Self-Doubt, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Self-Inflicted Injury, Suicidal Thoughts, Swearing, Touch Repulsion, Uncensored Potty Language, Whump, also my one hundredth fic on ao3, as Thomas Sanders would say, bug mentions, centipede mentions, death mentions, didn't know that one was in there so thank you for letting me know about that one!, implied/referenced PTSD, it's used as a metaphor but tw-ing it anyways, like a lot of whump, not bittersweet no this one's bitter, personas only, psychological whump (I guess), read the tags people, the awful ideology that crying is weak, title from yet another twentyonepilots song, touch starvation, tws for:, winged Grian au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27105394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldstone_Wolf/pseuds/Goldstone_Wolf
Summary: It’s not easy to escape your demons when your demons are in your own head.Grian’s learned that the hard way.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 183





	Guns for Hands

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you who are like “why do you spell things in a mix of British and American English?” I like the way some of the words (colour, favourite, realise, etc) look with the letter changes. It’s nicer and easier on my writing. Weird little quirk, I guess, but I put up with it.   
> Anyways, TWs are in tags. Please make sure that you read them. The title is from the twentyonepilots album “Vessel”, and it might have been the first one that I ever listened to. Also, this is my hundredth fic on Ao3, so that’s pretty exciting I guess.   
> Uh…let’s jump into this, shall we?

**Grian was slain by Phantom**

Jolting upright in his bed, Grian cursed loudly and then turned, punching his pillow. _Idiot. Idiot you idiot you’re a_ pro _and you got killed by a_ phantom?! _What’s wrong with you?_

He dragged himself out of bed, ignoring the lingering ache in his bones, and then scowled around his base. It was disgusting, there were shulker boxes and chests piled everywhere. _You need to get around to_ cleaning _, you disgusting little_ hoarder, his mind hissed. He tried to wave it off. Didn’t succeed. Actually, he probably only made it worse. _Look at this. You’re almost living in your own filth._

_Shut up._ Carding a hand through his hair and tugging at the ends, Grian sucked in a breath through his nose. Sometimes, thinking of…that as not him but someone else—NPG or sometimes even Ex or Hels—actually helped. This time around, it really didn’t.

Flaring his wings out, Grian checked over the feathers and yanked out a few bloody ones. He didn’t care if they were loose or not (they weren’t, he felt little sparks of pain like someone had driven a nail into his hand. Of course he could feel pain, if the Nether was damned then so was he to feel like this. None of the others experienced pain, they used their elytra to get everywhere but he, _he_ had the forsaken _privilege_ of running himself until he had no energy, burning through food faster than anyone else, and knowing exactly what it was like to feel a trident impale through his own flesh and bone and pin him to a tree whilst the others could fly on their merry way after a few moments of repairs.) The little brown and red things scattered on the ground, dark red at the tips where he’s bled on them. Scoffing, Grian turned and stormed out of his base

When he reached the door, he paused and glanced in the mirror. Straighten up, put on a smile whether it’s genuine or total codswallop (they all called him cod boy. They weren’t wrong. He did look like a fish and they were both disgusting and lived in their own filth). Fix his posture, tilt his head the right way as a test to make sure the bags under his eyes weren’t so prominent. Then, and only then, he flew off.

He hated his reflection in the mirror.

Too thin of a jaw (too thin of everything—flying burned so many calories he could never put on weight, but he’d never lost so much that people worried about him even when he did skip meals). His eyes were massive and disgusting. _He_ was disgusting, but that was another day’s conversation.

_Oh, really? Are you going to have that conversation when you’re finally cleaning up the horrid state of your room? Or maybe when you’re building more for the Mycelium Resistance? Oh, look at me, I’m Grian, I work and work and work and even then I still fail at the easiest of things._ His mind supplied, and Grian let the easy grin fall off his face for a split second. _Oh, no, don’t do that. You can’t let that silly little façade of yours fall away like this. No, no, no, that simply won’t do._

With a powerful beat of his wings, Grian slammed to a stop and landed on the thick leaves of a jungle tree. He hadn’t even made it that far outside his base. _Stupid, stupid,_ stupid you idiot you have work to do.

His stomach growled. Ignoring it, he checked over his wings and found more bloodied feathers. It was a vicious cycle. He tore out the ones that he found bloodied so the others wouldn’t worry, which in turn bloodied more feathers, which he would then rip out and begin the whole cycle. Again and again and again, like a leaf caught in a whirlpool but never quite dipping below the water’s surface. So he dumped the feathers on the canopy—he could afford to skip a meal, it wasn’t like he hadn’t done it in the past and it wasn’t like he didn’t eat enough already (he just never gained weight and no one knew why and no one ever commented about it in worry but the last time the hermits had all eaten together Cleo had chuckled and said, “No wonder you’re so thin!” when she saw the pathetic meal he’d managed to scrape together because he hated food. He hated being hungry, his stomach didn’t really growl so much as jab him in the ribs and ache and then the idea of food made him want to throw up.)

Grian opened his wings to take off, scowling down at the feathers lying bloody amongst the bright green leaves. _I wonder how it’d look if it was my body on the floor,_ he suddenly wondered, then froze. Of course his mind wandered along that train of thought whether he wanted it to or not. _It’d be easy. No one would care—they haven’t seen me in a while. I could just jump off some cliffs or a tree and not open my wings. Break my neck._

_But I’d never be able to do that. Too much of a coward. I’d end up spreading my wings and trying to fly off, break a lot of bones and have an awkward conversation with Xisuma._ Shaking his head, Grian took a few shaky breaths and then tugged at the collar of his jumper. He couldn’t breathe. He needed to breathe normally but he couldn’t he couldn’t he was an idiot _monster_ he was pathetic and weak and mean and manipulative and he was everything Sam had said he was. _Come_ on, focus! _You have better things to do than this! Moron!_

There was a dim twinge in his wrist and he glanced down. It was a phantom pain, from an injury whilst building a long time ago. He hadn’t scarred ( _he never scarred and Sam never hit him just used words he had no proof of anything Sam had said never recorded it and the worst never happened when others were around so of course they all stopped believing him one day)_. A dim thought flashed through his mind of what his arms would look like if he took a knife and cut up his wrists, and he could almost see the blood dripping from the injuries.

_No, no, stop I don’t want to see that stop it!_ Cringing back, Grian ran his hands into his hair and dropped to his knees. He needed to control his breathing. He couldn’t afford to have a panic attack. _Focus focus focus you_ fucking _idiot this is not the time to cry like a little_ baby _. You are a professional—_

_A professional idiot, clearly._

_You can handle a little_ tears. _You know how to do this. You put on a show, throw on some façade or other._ Digging his fingers into his hair, Grian took in a few more breaths through his mouth before finally realising that he _needed_ to do _something_ he couldn’t breathe he was dying his wrist was right there.

He bit himself.

He _bit_ his own wrist, right on the back where his sleeve covered and where the bones stuck out a little bit by his hand, like a fucking _animal._

_He bit himself._

Sitting back, tears still running down his face and staring at the indents his teeth had made in his skin, Grian sucked in a few breaths. He hadn’t done that in years, not since right after getting away from Sam and thinking maybe he wasn’t real, maybe everything around him wasn’t real and he had needed a way to ground himself. Shoulders shaking (and wings shuddering as a result), he took a few long breaths and then looked at himself in the lens of his communicator on his other wrist. He wasn’t bleeding, he’d be fine.

_You look like a mess._

He did look like a mess. At least his face wasn’t super blotchy and puffy, but his cheeks and nose were a flushed pink and his eyes were red. Growling again, Grian scratched the back of his arm a few times. Not enough to bleed—that’d take a while, his nails were longer than they usually were ( _you need to clip them you piece of garbage it’s disgusting how much grit and dust is under your nails and people think that, too)_ , but still pretty blunt.

Getting up and cursing himself, Grian flew back to his base. He needed to get cleaned up, needed to do _something_ to hide the—

His communicator began beeping, buzzing in the familiar tone he’d set up specifically for when Xisuma called meetings. _It can wait a few minutes._ He reasoned, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror while splashing water on his face. He needed to keep it from looking like he had been crying at all. He’d been so _good_ about it, too, hadn’t cried in _weeks_. ( _Weeks isn’t long enough, you shouldn’t be crying at all. You’re going to freak them all out, they’re going to think you went missing or that you hate them or you’re going to—)_

_“Shut up!”_ Grian screamed, mostly to himself. Gripping the sides of the cold porcelain sink, he leaned his forehead against cool glass and closed his eyes. His jaw ached. His shoulders ached. _Everything_ ached—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d asked for someone to touch him. Sure, there were moments where others would do it without asking (he hated that they didn’t ask he didn’t _like_ being touched. He wasn’t scared of it, but the feeling made his skin crawl like centipedes were skittering over his bones). Mumbo would clap him on the shoulder when he walked by. Sometimes Scar or Iskall would tackle-hug him. Tango had a tendency to grab people’s wrists and grab them around (the worst was when he had once grabbed Grian by the back of the shirt—it was to keep him from falling—but his fingers had brushed the back of his neck. That was where Sam used to grab him and squeeze and force him to walk wherever he wanted even when Grian felt like he couldn’t breathe and like Sam’s fingers were too close to the soft spot behind his ears where his carotid artery was, where Sam just needed to press and then the blood flow to Grian’s brain would have been cut off or even severed and then he would die he would die _he would die_ —)

He didn’t know how long it was before he heard footsteps in his hallway. Looking up, Grian checked that he looked decent before walking out, finding Scar in the hallway. “Oh! Grian, we were worried you weren’t coming. Everything alright?”

Tilting his head to the side and closing his eyes, Grian smiled and said, “I’m fine! Let’s head to that meeting.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yay more Griangst from me. I’d write more but honestly this seems like a pretty good spot for it to end.


End file.
